Compare Dish Network Satellite TV to PC Satellite TV

The intro

Recently we have seen more and more people choosing satellite-to-PC software as their TV entertainment system instead of cable TV or satellite TV over cable or satellite TV. It is believe that such market trend is mainly due to its extremely cheap set up price when compare to other paid TV services.

For example Dish Network satellite TV, setting up Dish Network satellite TV system requires no start up cost at all but you will need to pay around $20 to $80 monthly subscription fees depending on your programming selection choice. Satellite PC on the other hand requires less than ten bucks for the set up and it charges only one time fees. Such extreme price difference affects greatly on consumer's spending when comes to TV entertainment.

However, cheap price is one thing, the usability and the entertainment it brings is another. Satellite PC might sounds like a great deals when first heard but as you go deep into their offers, you will notice there are lots of limitation when compare to satellite TV.

Reliability of free satellite TV program on PC

Without doubts, the satellite-to-PC program itself is a cool product but when come to commercializing the products, that's another story.

As satellite PCs were priced relative cheap, its reliability in customer services and after sales supports seems questionable. On the other hand, Dish Network, owned by Echostar Communication Cooperation, was licensed in March 1996 and owns more than 12 million subscribers at the time of writing. The company, along with their retailer offers professional installations, online website support, as well as 24/7 customer phone supports.

Does satellite-to-PC vendors offer the same kind of support when comes to after sales services? The question remains unanswered.

From a consumer point of view, transferring satellite TV program to PC requires set up in computer hardware and installation of software. Most of the time consumers are required to set all things up by themselves - what if things went wrong during the set up process? Do the program vendors provide customer services like Dish Network does? What if the Internet speed is not good enough to support the high bandwidth requirement of satellite PC? Do we get cash back in that situation?

Then how about PC system? Virus attacks, bugs in operating systems, Trojan files - all these might cause you hours to format and fix. When these problems come in, it goes directly to my so call PC satellite TV as well where I might need to reinstall the satellite-to-PC software and reset all my program channels. Do we have to do all things again all by ourselves?

Picture quality

Satellite-to-PC program transmit their signals via Internet connection. Common understanding, these TV signals are compacted before it sent to consumer's PC such as peer-to-peer video streaming. In order to send these signals smoothly and fast, the picture quality is normally reduced and the resolution of the picture size are normally shrunk during the compact process. Consumer might be watching low resolutions picture. Things come worse if satellite-to-PC cannot enlarge the TV picture on their PC monitor due to low resolutions.

When compare to normal satellite TV broadcast (Dish Network for example), the picture quality differentiates them greatly. Conventional satellite TV programs are broadcast in top notch picture quality. Not to mention on satellite TV programs that run on HD technologies.

Programming choices

Perhaps another good point on PC satellite is its wide selection of Programming choices. Dish Network satellite TV offers around 250++ programming channels. For satellite-to-PC, it theoretically offers unlimited programming selections to its users. Users are able to watch TV program from worldwide: United States, United Kingdom, Spain, India, China, Indonesia, Australia… you name it, satellite-to-PC have it.